


things left unsaid

by anamatics



Category: Elementary (TV)
Genre: Coming of Age, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-02-09
Updated: 2014-02-09
Packaged: 2018-01-11 19:06:21
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,602
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1176762
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/anamatics/pseuds/anamatics
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Kayden Fuller grows into her name and her identity, sort of.</p>
<p>(or, it’s a big happy family and somehow Kayden makes four.)</p>
            </blockquote>





	things left unsaid

**Author's Note:**

  * Translation into Русский available: [Всё, что недосказано](https://archiveofourown.org/works/2499356) by [kapitanova](https://archiveofourown.org/users/kapitanova/pseuds/kapitanova)



Kayden is eight when her father dies - shot in the night by home invaders.

She is taken then, held against her will in a room all her own.  She is rescued by a woman with blood dripping down her hands.

"Are you an angel?" she asks as the woman points her towards a door with gentle hands and tells her to run and not look back.

That earns her a chuckle, the woman swaying on her feet like Kayden’s father sometimes did when he had too much wine.  “I’m going to make them sorry for hurting you,” she promises, even though Kayden has no cuts or bruises.

Kayden runs into the arms of a police officer, who scoops her up in a blanket and drives her home.

-

Kayden turns nine on a Monday; a letter stamped from Sicily arrives in the mail.  She reads the address carefully, sad that it is not from England.  She still has two years until her Hogwarts letter comes, she supposes.

Like Harry, her mother takes the letter away with sad eyes and a gentle touch on her shoulder.  There is no shouting, though, and more letters do not come. 

Kayden never forgets about it though.

-

They move when Kayden is eleven, closer to her school.  She can walk by herself now, and she feels impossibly grown up with her metro card and her backpack.

At school they tease her, jeering that her father’s dead because he couldn’t buy a good enough lock.  Kayden knows better, she knows exactly how good a lock was on their door the night her father dies.  She tells them and their eyes go wide.

It’s another instance in a string of bad memories where Kayden feels like she doesn’t fit in.  There’s something off about her, something that cannot be put into words.

"I have a guardian angel," she tells the priest who teaches her English class.

"I’m sure you do, dear," he replies, handing her a set of exercises. 

-

When Kayden is twelve she is placed in a math class with eighth graders, who don’t know what to make of her.  The older kids aren’t mean like they are in her class, and Kayden likes the challenge of the problems that are set to her.

She goes back to her English class, where they’re reading  _Johnny Tremain,_  and sits in her seat and doesn’t pay attention.  She doesn’t much care about a book she’s already read and she hates how Johnny couldn’t work on a Sunday.  It just seems stupid now.

When they read  _Bridge to Terabithia_  the next month, Kayden gets sent to the headmaster for giving a presentation on stories about loss of innocence.  They are good reading material for sixth-grader; however, she goes on to point out, the constant theme of death is somewhat suspect. 

She’d been trying to argue, she’d had to explain to the headmaster, that it was stupid to make children read books about death when they were just coming of age.  ”These stories were written when kids actually died before they got to grow up.  They don’t do that anymore, it’s all lies.” she had said, hands clenched into angry fists.  “I hate reading about how the dog always dies in the end.”

In  _Bridge to Terabithia_ , she realizes belatedly, it is not the dog that dies.  But rather the best friend.

She decides it’s the same thing and moves on.

-

Her mother tells her that she’s adopted when she turns thirteen, gets asked out for the first time and starts her period - all on the same day. 

"Things come in threes," her not-mother had said, handing her a pad and telling her that they’d try tampons after she’d a few more periods.  She’d said something about flow and tampon size and Kayden had wanted to jam her fingers into her ears and go ‘la-la-la’ because  _that_  sounded gross.

"Who is my real mother?"  Kayden had asked then, fingers curling around the diaper-like material of the pad. 

Her mother had shrugged.  “We never met her,” she’d explained sadly.  “I wish I could tell you more.”

Later, after calling Ross back and saying that yes, she’d go see the Wonder Woman movie with him; she’d stared at her face in the mirror for a long time, trying to imagine what her mother might have looked like. 

She would have been blonde, Kayden decides, even though her hair is brown.  Blonde makes sense, because Kayden has blue eyes and they’re learning in science class about how genetic traits work.  Her eyes would be the same as Kayden’s, steely and blue. 

-

Kayden is thirteen and a half when she resolves to find her mother.  There are so many pieces to the puzzle that Kayden feels like she’s drowning.  She makes a list and then puts it though the shredder at school.  Then she makes another and tucks it under her pillow; the first item on the list, she feels, is the key. 

She wants to know more about the night her father died.  Maybe, and she knows she’s acting fanciful; her father was killed because he knew.  So little about that ordeal makes sense now that she thinks about it, years after the fact.  There has to be something she’s missed.

She googles how to access a police report and prints out the necessary forms at school. 

"What do you need those for?"  the computer lab proctor asks as Kayden collects them and goes back to her desk. 

"I want to know about a murder," Kayden replies, tapping the Freedom of Information Act form with the back of her pencil.  "This is what I have to bring with me."

The proctor can’t say much else, and Kayden fills out the forms.  She calls her mom and says she has to stay late for a math study session on her way home, and hops on a train headed for Brooklyn.

-

Kayden is thirteen and a half when she sees the woman who rescued her again.  She’s allowed to sit, locked in the evidence room, and look through the file.  She’d forged her mother signature on the consent form, so they don’t take out the crime scene photos that are bloody.

And they are bloody.  A man has had his throat cut, nearly down to the bone.  The report says that it was done with his own pen knife.  Kayden thinks it’s wicked.  There’s a photo of the injuries sustained by the woman who rescued her, bloody and gross.  Kayden stares at them for a long time before she finally sets them aside.

There’s a note attached to the file, a name.

_Moriarty, J._

She reads the notes and realizes that there is more to this than she’d initially thought.  She resolves then, to try and meet the people who worked on this case.  Maybe they will know how to contact the woman who saved her.

-

She gets cold feet the first time she goes back to Brooklyn.  And the second time.

The third time, a woman walks out of the door just as Kayden is about to turn and run down the steps.

"Oh," she says her hand still on the door knob.  "Can I help you?"  She’s looking at Kayden oddly, almost intensely.  Kayden’s never been stared at like that before. 

There’s recognition in those eyes, too. 

"I’m looking for Sherlock Holmes or Joan Watson?" she says, fiddling with the two-month old paper that she’s taken to carrying around.  It’s got this address written on it.  And the name she’d found in the police report.

"I’m Joan Watson," the woman says. 

-

Kayden is thirteen and three quarters when she realizes that her name holds power.

"My name is Kayden Fuller," she says as she sits down at the kitchen table and Joan Watson puts the kettle on for tea.

Or rather, Joan Watson freezes and the water that was going into the kettle flows out the spout and over the top.  She’s standing very still, Kayden notices, her back ramrod straight.  She knows Kayden’s name.

"You’re a lot bigger than the last time I saw you," she says. She shuts off the sink quickly and pours the extra water from the kettle. 

"I found your name in the police report on my kidnapping," Kayden explains.  "I was wondering if you could tell me more about it?"

Joan Watson runs a hand through her hair and turns, staring at Kayden.  “You’re looking for her,” she says, and it isn’t a question.

"I am."

-

What Kayden doesn’t anticipate is being sat down and told how she is too impossibly young to need to know this.  “I saw the police report,” she protests.  She sits back, hands clasped in her lap.  “It won’t shock me.”

Joan Watson’s face drains of color and she casts around as if desperate for something to say.  Kayden’s mother does this a lot too, when Kayden asks her questions she cannot answer.

"The last thing any child wants to hear is that their parents didn’t - don’t want them," Joan turns and picks up the kettle just as it starts to whistle.  She makes them both tea and sets the mug down in front of Kayden.

"You know her," Kayden guesses.

Joan Watson looks away.  Her hair falls over her face and there’s a moment where Kayden doesn’t understand at all.  She wants to scream in that moment, her mind racing too quick for her to keep up.  They give her pills for that at school, sometimes, but mostly they just give her math.  She does the problems and she calms down.

Kayden calculates the volume of her mug of tea using the length of her finger as x.  She counts to ten.  She breathes out betrayal and doesn’t cry out.

"I do know her," Joan answers.  She runs a tired hand through her hair; gathering it into a sloppy bun and looping a hair tie from around her wrist to hold it into place.  "You shouldn’t."

-

Kayden has just turned fourteen when she meets Sherlock Holmes for the first time.  He comes by a few days after her birthday with a set of watercolors wrapped up in newspaper.  “I have a riddle for you,” he says, bouncing on the balls of his feet.

"How did you know I liked them?"  Kayden asks, setting the paints aside.  Her mother remembers him from their investigation, it seems, and she’s let him speak to Kayden alone.

He scratches at the back of his neck.  He isn’t clean shaven like the teachers and priests at school.  Kayden thinks he looks like a homeless person.  A very well dressed homeless person, but a homeless person all the same.  “Call it a hunch,” he says.

The riddle is written on a neat piece of paper in a woman’s handwriting.  Kayden wonders if Joan Watson wrote it down for him.  “Solve it,” he says, “and come find me.”

-

She asks her mother about the letter she’d received on her ninth birthday that night.  Her mother gets up and disappears into her room for a long time, before she comes back, looking upset.  “I thought I’d kept it,” she says dejectedly.  “It must have gotten lost in the move.”

Kayden clenches her hands into fists under the dinner table and nods.  She believes her mother, because her mother has no reason to lie, but it still hurts.  She’d wanted to know what it had said so badly, now she never would.

-

It takes Kayden almost two months to solve the riddle.  She guesses that it could have taken her less time, but she’s buried under prep for the AP Statistics exam that they’re making her take now so they can let her take more advanced classes to replace her math classes at school.

She takes a train to Brooklyn on a sunny Saturday afternoon while her mother is out with friends playing tennis.  She doesn’t leave a note.

Sherlock Holmes answers the door when she knocks, and lets her into his house.  The first thing that Kayden sees is wall, awash with colors and images.  “This is a murder board,” she breathes, staring up at it.  She’s read about them in criminal psychology books, a way for investigators to visualize all the evidence at once.

He fidgets as she looks to him for confirmation.

"What?" she asks.

"It’s just…" He reaches forward, fingers twitching, and then pulls his hand back.  "You look a great deal like her."

"Joan said the same thing."

He bounces once, twice, three times, and then turns, not meeting Kayden’s gaze.  “She would know better than I.”

Kayden doesn’t understand.

-

The answer to the riddle has three parts.  Kayden explains her logic on each one, including the tricky second part that required a lot more diagramming and use of her neglected Lego collection.  Holmes sits, listening to her explain it, and then nods his approval.

Silence fills the room then, and finally Sherlock turns to the murder board.  “What do you think of this?” he asks.

Kayden is fourteen and two months old the first time she helps to solve a murder.  She sees patterns, words in a numerical sequence that doesn’t make much sense.

"Where’s Joan?" Kayden asks after Sherlock gets off the phone with her mother, explaining that she’s helping him with a particularly vexing case and that he will personally escort her home once it’s solved.

For a long time, Sherlock says nothing at all.

-

"Joan is with her paramour," Sherlock announces some twenty minutes of uncomfortable silence later. He’d disappeared into the kitchen for a few moments, staring into the refrigerator before closing it with disgust. He hands her a stack of take-out menus.  "Pick what you’d like.  We’re on our own tonight, I’m afraid."

Kayden doesn’t say that she thought that they were like… married or something.  No, that seems like an ill-founded assumption now.  They’re just people who live together, she supposes.  It sort of makes more sense.

She picks out Chinese and debates the merits of curry chicken or Singapore noodles with Sherlock for a few minutes before they settle on curry chicken and dumplings on the side.

"Do you think it’s weird that my mom is letting me stay here?" Kayden asks.

He shakes his head.  “Your mother understands that I am not a threat to you.  I spoke to her after the first time you graced my doorstep with your presence, and she agrees that if this is how you want to spend your free time then so be it.”  He smiles then, wide and easy.  “You should probably stop lying to her so much, though, Kayden.”

"I’ll try," Kayden lies.

He doesn’t push it.

-

Sherlock teaches her how to pick locks and Joan teaches her how to empathize with people - how to get into their heads and predict their moves.

And when Kayden is fifteen, she meets the woman that she’s seen in passing and in her dreams quite by mistake.

She’s sitting with Ms. Hudson, Sherlock and Joan’s housekeeper, going over some basic Ancient Greek because it’s fascinating and Kayden likes that it’s a language that no one else speaks, one afternoon when everything changes. She’s in the process of explaining to Ms. Hudson that the wants to start a diary in it, and it’s a lot easier to learn than one of the Tolkien languages or Klingon.

They both hear it, the door opening even though Sherlock and Joan are out interviewing a suspect in their most recent case.  Ms. Hudson gets to her feet and goes to see who it is.  Kayden follows half a step behind her, worksheet of verbs still in her hand.  She stops, just out of view, she doesn’t know why, but she just does.  Something clenches in her stomach and Kayden cannot bring herself to move.

"They’re not here are they?" comes a voice, an English voice like Sherlock’s.  He’s been teaching her about accents and how to place them by queues, but this one she cannot place.  She’s still learning, she reasons.

"Sorry, Jamie," Ms. Hudson says tiredly.  "They’re off interviewing someone about the Dreyfus affair."

They both laugh then, and Kayden wonders why it’s so funny.  She resolves to ask Ms. Hudson when the intruder leaves.  “I should have called,” comes the first voice,  _Jamie’s_ voice.  “My plans changed, you see.”

Kayden can hear the polite tenseness in Ms. Hudson’s voice.  She doesn’t like this Jamie very much.  “Sherlock mentioned that I shouldn’t expect to see you for a while.”

"Well yes, he would, wouldn’t he?"  There’s a bitter-sounding laugh.  "He likes to think that if he tries hard enough he can make Joan see logic."

There’s a pause and then Ms. Hudson coughs.  “Well, you’re welcome to wait.” she says.  “Sherlock’s … Christ, I don’t even to know what to call her, protégé maybe, is here.  Have you met her?”

"He hasn’t mentioned her…"

Kayden hurries back to the kitchen and plants her butt in her chair and tries to complete as much of the worksheet as she thinks is possible.   _Eavesdropping when you’ll get caught is just in poor form,_  Sherlock’s voice says in her head.

-

There’s a moment, when the woman walks into the kitchen half a step behind Ms. Hudson, where everything goes absolutely still.  Kayden’s pencil is halfway through a delta and she finishes it as the woman wraps her arms around herself.

"Oh," she says, and her face pulls into an expression that Kayden knows well.  It’s a self-deprecating sort of a smile, the kind that Kayden smiles when she knows she’s given the wrong answer in school, or when she’s been schooled at trivia by Sherlock or Joan. "Well played, Sherlock.  Well played."

Ms. Hudson’s cellphone rings then, and she walks towards the front of the house to answer it with an apologetic smile.

"We’ve never been properly introduced," The woman says to Kayden as she scribbles down the translation of the verb she’s just written beside it.  The woman holds out her hand and she doesn’t smile.  There’s a raised mark on her wrist, a scar from the first time they met. "Jamie Moriarty."

"I’m Kayden Fuller."  This isn’t how she pictured this meeting going, when she first started to fantasize about it almost two years ago.  No, there were supposed to be tears and promises that she’d never feel misplaced every again.  Kayden hates it, she hates the feeling she matters so little to this woman that her presence is more a clever move by Sherlock than a wonderful coincidence.

They stare at each other for a long time.  Ms. Hudson comes back and takes the worksheet from Kayden and corrects her spelling in a few places and tells her to practice the vocabulary.

"That was Joan," she explains, her red pen flying over the page.  "Sherlock has to go to the police station for a while, but Joan’s going to come back here."

"Okay," Kayden says.

Jamie Moriarty says nothing at all.

-

The first thing Joan says when she walks into the house is, “This is not happening.”  Kayden thinks it’s an auspicious start.

She’s sitting cross-legged in front of two boxes of padlocks, a lock pick in one hand.  She’s been opening them and chucking them into the other box one by one as her birth mother studiously ignores her and stares up at the murder wall.

"It was a clever trick," Jamie Moriarty says, her arms folded over her chest.  Kayden jams the pick into the next lock and pretends to be invisible.  "Of his, to not tell me of this development."  She turns then, staring hard at Joan.  "Tell me, were you involved?"

"Besides not mentioning her to you?" Joan pulls off her coat and turns to hang it on the coat rack before.  Kayden unlocks another lock and tosses it into the open bucket. "I understood how you felt about it, and I tried to keep you two separate as best I could."

Kayden wishes she understood why this was happening.

"Kayden," Joan says, coming back into the room.  She’s dressed all in white compared to Jamie Moriarty’s black.  "I think it’s best if you went home now."

"But Sherlock—" Kayden starts, clicking another lock open.

"Don’t," Joan says, and her tone is final.  She never takes that tone with Kayden.  She seems to reserve it for Sherlock when he’s at his most manic.  "He’ll tell you all about the interview on Saturday, alright?"  She looks helplessly at the woman who is supposed to be Kayden’s mother.  "This wasn’t supposed to happen this way."

_No shit_ , Kayden thinks, and chucks the lock into the box.  She collects her papers and glares at the pair of them before storming out of the house and up the block to the train station.

-

Kayden posts on her blog that night about what had happened.  She avoids names and places, just that she’d met the woman who was supposed to be her mother, and that she was cold and obviously wanted nothing to do with Kayden.

She cries herself to sleep that night.

-

Kayden takes AP Art History her freshman year. Now that she’s finally in high school people stop treating her like she’s too smart.  She’s allowed to take any classes she wants and she takes art classes and math classes, because they are the two things she likes.  She stays up super late talking to Olivia, a girl in her class that she thinks she sort of likes, about music and how they both want to try and get into the photography class second semester.

She tells Joan about how she isn’t sure if she likes boys or girls one night as they’re sitting around waiting for Sherlock to untie himself from his latest venture into Houdini acts.

"Don’t put a label on yourself," Joan says after a moment.  "You’re far too young for that."

It’s been six months since Kayden met Jamie Moriarty, and they still haven’t talked about it.

"When did you know?" Kayden asks, because Joan definitely doesn’t seem to have a preference.

This earns her a chuckle.  “Well,” Joan begins, “when I was a kid there weren’t the resources that there are now. My mom’s pretty traditional, so it wasn’t until I was in my twenties that I realized that as long as I was happy, I didn’t care.”

It seems to wise to Kayden’s nearly fifteen years.

"I like that," Kayden says.

"Good."

-

Kayden is just fifteen when she learns what Joan Watson hadn’t wanted her to know the first time she’d asked about her mother.

She and Olivia are hiding out in the kitchen of Sherlock’s house, because there’s no one home and Kayden wants to kiss Olivia without having to worry about her mom walking in and freaking out on her.  She does, after all, still go to Catholic school.

They’re definitely past first base when there’s the tell-tale creak of floorboards upstairs.  Someone’s in the house.

"I thought you said that no one was going to be here," Olivia hisses, pulling her shirt down.

Sherlock and Joan are out on Long Island, running down a lead in Riverhead with Detective Bell.  They’re not due to get back until much later tonight.

"Get behind me," Kayden says.  She knows where Sherlock keeps his single stick, and she collects it as silently as possible.  She debates calling the police, but she knows where the stash of cash that Sherlock uses to pay his informants is, and she wants to make sure that it isn’t one of them first.

Olivia creeps up the stairs behind her, Kayden holding the single stick before her like it will actually protect them from an intruder.  Especially if the intruder is armed.

There’s a figure silhouetted in the front room’s windows.

"Oh, it’s you," Jamie Moriarty’s voice sounds far off and distant.  Kayden almost trips over her own feet, reaching for the light switch.

She’s hurt, Kayden can see that as dull yellow light fills the room.  There’s blood on her shoulder and she’s got her hand gripping it tightly. She’s deathly pale. And in her other hand there’s a gun.

Kayden’s never seen a real one before, but she recognizes it as a Beretta of medium caliber from one of the books that Sherlock’s suggested she read and takes half a step back, Olivia gripping at her shoulders like a shield.  “You should put that down,” Kayden says in the firmest voice she can think of.

A chuckle.  “I can’t do that,” comes the reply.  “I might need it yet.”

Kayden tosses aside the single stick and marches up the stairs, collects the first aid kit and heads back downstairs.  Olivia is eyeing her like she’s insane, and Kayden cannot help herself. She’s taken a first aid class; she can get sued if she doesn’t offer help.

"What happened?"

Jamie Moriarty regards her with eyes that are so alike her own, before reaching up with bloody fingers to touch her cheek.  “I’d hoped you’d never learn of this,” she breathes, her fingers a feather light brush against Kayden’s cheek.  She looks away then.  “It’s just a graze, Kayden.  This was a restructuring I hadn’t anticipated.”  She smiles then, a sad, private sort of smile.  “You and your friend should go. I’ll be fine until Joan gets back from Riverhead.”

"I’m not going to leave you like this," Kayden protests, remembering another time she’d run away from this woman when she was hurt.  She’d promised herself never again.

-

Olivia has gone out to the Duane Reed a few blocks over to get some more bandages and Kayden has discovered that blood doesn’t bother her very much at all.  She stands with her fingers clad in bloody crime scene gloves and Jamie Moriarty’s shirt half cut away from her shoulder.  The bullet truly has just grazed her, but it’s bleeding a lot and Kayden doesn’t know how to get it to stop.  She tries googling it, Jamie gives a derisive snort at her efforts and talks her though the process.

"Upstairs, in Joan’s room under the loose floorboard by the window," Kayden hears her injured charge mumble.  "There’s a bottle.  Go get it, will you."

Kayden takes the stairs two at a time and finds the floorboard easily enough.  Inside is a bottle of (if the boys at school are anything to go off of) very expensive scotch.  She grabs it and heads back downstairs, pressing it into Jamie’s good hand and stepping back. 

"It was supposed to be for a special occasion," she confesses.  "Joanie can’t drink much with Sherlock in the house."

She’s starting to think something is really wrong and all of her frantic texts to Joan have gone unanswered.  She debates just calling 911, but she doesn’t think it’s a good idea.  Someone had tried to shoot Jamie; they could have people in the police.

She doesn’t open the bottle, not yet at any rate.  Kayden stares at her, fingers tugging at the gauze and rubbing alcohol that she’s pressing to Jamie’ shoulder.  This woman is her mother, in some loose sense of the word, and Kayden thinks she’s mixed up in something awful.

"I run a multinational criminal organization."

That hadn’t been what she was expecting.  She tugs the last of the gauze away and Jamie continues to speak, fingers playing with the neck of the bottle of scotch. 

"I was just out of university when you were born, you know?  I was too young and I knew then that I couldn’t do it."

"Do what?"

"Be a mother, Kayden," she says, fingers white knuckled on the bottle.  She’s pulled the top off of it now, and she takes a swig, her eyes widening temporarily.  Kayden imagines that it burns.  "I do not have the capacity to love.  Joan will tell you otherwise, but you shouldn’t listen to her. She always tries to see the best in me, but my soul’s rotten to the core."

Olivia comes back just then, and she shoves the bandages at Kayden and looks bewildered.  “You’re lucky my mom lets me have a credit card,” she jokes mostly to Kayden, but its Jamie who lets out a pained laugh.

Her phone beeps; Joan has finally read her texts.  They’re about twenty minutes away and she should sit tight.

"Who is your friend, Kayden?"  Jamie asks, fingers digging through the Duane Reed bag and producing a fresh package of bandages.  She twists then, dressing the wound systematically and with a skill that somewhat alarms Kayden.  This isn’t the first time this has happened.

Kayden smiles, pulling off her cloves and touching Olivia’s arm through her school sweater.  “This is Olivia,” she explains.

-

Olivia’s father is in the Foreign Service and they’re stationed in Istanbul the next year.  It’s a tearful farewell at JFK, Kayden sobbing into Olivia’s shoulder and promising to Skype every day.  

It happens once or twice, but the time difference makes it hard.  Kayden ends it in an email and cries about it on Sherlock’s shoulder when he comes by on his way back from a crime scene.  He pats her shoulder and doesn’t pull away like he tends to when people are showing emotion.  Kayden is grateful.

They don’t talk about the night that Jamie Moriarty had shown up on his doorstep, shot and bleeding.  Kayden’s never gotten the full story out of Joan or Sherlock about why he doesn’t like Jamie, but there is a story there.

She makes up versions in her head to pass the time, sitting idly in her human biology class.  Soon though, as she delves into the material, she finds that she’s not making up stories at all. She’s drawn into the subject and it is beautiful – how the human body works.  It’s the most fascinating class she’s ever taken, and she decides then and there that she wants to be a doctor. 

Joan laughs when Kayden announces this fact, a few weeks after her sixteenth birthday. 

"I owe Sherlock and Marcus ten bucks each," she explains after she calms down, her cheeks red and rosy.  "I thought for sure that you were going to want to be a cop."  She takes Kayden up to her room and hands her book after book on anatomy and medical terminology.

Kayden laughs bitterly.  “What kind of a cop can have a career criminal for a mother?” she asks, clutching  _Gray’s Anatomy_ to her chest.

"Your mother," Joan points out, not for the first time, "is a corporate accountant at one of the largest firms in the city.  The woman who birthed you, though you share blood with her, did not raise you.  She is not your mother. She had merely a passing influence on your life."

When Kayden was thirteen, Joan had told her about what it was like to know that the man you called ‘father’ was not your father.  Kayden wonders if this was the same thing, or if it was somehow different.  She wants to say that it’s different. 

It isn’t.

-

When Kayden turns seventeen, Jamie Moriarty takes her out to breakfast before school and it’s very surreal.  Kayden hasn’t seen her in months (and Joan hasn’t mentioned her coming around).  She asks Kayden about the colleges she’s applied to and if she understands how much schooling becoming a doctor truly takes.  Debt never comes into the equation, because Kayden has had a college fund since she could walk and it’s only grown as the economy has boomed.

"I’m going to give you some free advice," Jamie says after a long sip of black coffee.  "Don’t let yourself be boxed in by one set of ideals and goals.  Look at Joan - she’s been so many things in her life that I can’t even begin to explain her career. You should aspire to be her, Kayden.  She is the best mentor you could possibly want to have."

"She’s a smart woman," Kayden agrees.

"Quite," Jamie replies.

And they both sip their coffee.

-

She goes to prom with a boy named Claude, which Joan finds hilarious and has Sherlock hiding smiles behind his hands.  He takes pictures of the both with his phone.  Kayden’s at their place because Kayden’s mom is horrible at doing hair and Joan’s actually okay at it. 

"You look like an angel," Joan tells her, and kisses her cheek.

Kayden loses her virginity in the back of Claude’s dad’s BMW that night.  She goes home and feels like an adult for the first time in her life.  It’s a very strange feeling.

She breaks up with Claude the next day.

-

Kayden gets into Harvard, and then into Yale.  She’s put onto Princeton’s waitlist and eventually decides to go to NYU for undergrad so that she can save some of her college fund and spend it on medical school.

They tell her that she’s going to be valedictorian one day in May, and ask her to write a speech for commencement. 

It takes three weeks for her to find something she actually wants to say.  The first weekend of June, clad in black robes with gold cords around her neck, Kayden talks about finding herself because she cannot talk about what it’s like to form a relationship with a woman who didn’t want to be her mother, once upon a time.  It’s a stupid speech, and she feels silly when everyone applauds.  She looks up then, and she sees one face in the back of the auditorium where she’s speaking, blonde hair all in black with an approving smile on her face.

And her heart soars.

**Author's Note:**

> sappy kid fic, now I've done it. also Kayden Fuller is a total nerd and worships the ground Joan Watson walks on. we should all love her for being so sensible.


End file.
